> One last tip: collaborating is much easier when a team is 100% remote or 100% in the office, but split is much harder.
While this maybe true for best outcomes. IMO even flexible work policy is better for people like me who are stuck in hellish commutes 5 days a week. 2-3 days in office is similar outcome and avoiding 3 hr /day commute times for couple of days a week.
> it's easy to swivel the chairs around for a quick impromptu chat.
This used to be true for me also 5-7 years back. However lately all important tech decisions comes from "enterprise architects" and what's left is sufficient for a webex call.
Also in my case team is distributed and of course travel is not approved for lowly engineers to have face to face collaboration. But nonetheless commute is mandatory. So the rule seems collaborate with remote co-workers but only from office.
> However lately all important tech decisions comes from "enterprise architects"
Honestly that sounds terrible.
> of course travel is not approved for lowly engineers...
Maybe look around for better company to work for. There are great teams out there.
Another path is to simply hold leaders accountable for output rather than working style. After all, is it acceptable for a team to under-deliver if they worked hard & worked in the office? Usually not. Working in the office is not sufficient to produce the right output.
If you hold leaders accountable for output, you can then let them decide how their team will work. It's way easier to solve this problem in a discussion among 5 team members than in a written policy for 500 or 5000.
One last tip: collaborating is much easier when a team is 100% remote or 100% in the office, but split is much harder. When everyone is remote all communication must be available remotely (and typically written). When everyone is in the office, it's easy to swivel the chairs around for a quick impromptu chat. But impromptu chats leave out the people who aren't there - that's why half local and half remote is harder.